I'm Finally Making a Post - Starting to Get Serious About Buying a D

[David T]

The DMA had a speaker a while back who was a worker at one of the QAC's and he said plainly, if a certain car had to go to a certain dealer and they didn't have a part, they took it off of another car. The cars went out to dealers by vin so when a particular car had to go out it went out. And it had to be in good, sellable condition. He said there were times the car carrier was waiting to load cars that were still being fixed into the night!. The QAC centers had no concerns for the production changes or "correctness". You can only imagine what they did to the cannibalized cars at the end to put them back together and make them sellable! They were short on parts so they slapped them together any way they could. There is no way to tell how "original" any Delorean is except for a very few like the GOLD cars or the PILOT cars. Back then they did not put vin #'s on parts like they do now. What we have is how the car "should" be according to the running vin changes. The only place where any of this really matters is at a concours judging event and for anyone entering that, they prepare the car well in advance and they know the rules and what the judges will look for. BTW, not only did the QAC centers have to deal with the production errors and problems, many of the cars got some damage from shipping. This was especially common on the early cars, things got better as production improved. One worker told us just about every car that went through the QAC center had to have scratches polished out of the glass. He couldn't understand why no one figured out a way to keep the glass from getting scratched in the first place!

[louielouie2000]

The DMA had a speaker a while back who was a worker at one of the QAC's and he said plainly, if a certain car had to go to a certain dealer and they didn't have a part, they took it off of another car. The cars went out to dealers by vin so when a particular car had to go out it went out. And it had to be in good, sellable condition. He said there were times the car carrier was waiting to load cars that were still being fixed into the night!. The QAC centers had no concerns for the production changes or "correctness". You can only imagine what they did to the cannibalized cars at the end to put them back together and make them sellable! They were short on parts so they slapped them together any way they could. There is no way to tell how "original" any Delorean is except for a very few like the GOLD cars or the PILOT cars. Back then they did not put vin #'s on parts like they do now. What we have is how the car "should" be according to the running vin changes. The only place where any of this really matters is at a concours judging event and for anyone entering that, they prepare the car well in advance and they know the rules and what the judges will look for. BTW, not only did the QAC centers have to deal with the production errors and problems, many of the cars got some damage from shipping. This was especially common on the early cars, things got better as production improved. One worker told us just about every car that went through the QAC center had to have scratches polished out of the glass. He couldn't understand why no one figured out a way to keep the glass from getting scratched in the first place!

I absolutely love learning nerdy DeLorean stuff like this, thanks for sharing.

This reminds me of the most recent DeLorean auctioned on Bring A Trailer. It was a 1,500 mile very late series black interior '83 with the correct '82 & '83 style light grey "fuzzy" carpet. Except when you look closer, the carpet on the wheel arches in the parcel shelf appear to be the darker carpets from an '81 black interior car. At first I wondered if this was an earlier car that was pulled off the production line due to some sort of issue, and it was later finished & re-VIN'd as Consolidated wound the factory down. I didn't even think about the possibility of the car being cobbled together at a QAC. Look at pics 20 & 27 to see what I'm referencing:

https://bringatrailer.com/listing/19...rean-dmc-12-5/